This is not just ANY cheese sauce – A RICH cheese sauce in 40 seconds. This is the promise of the Waring Cook Book for the 8 Button Blender. 1967.

Waring Cook Book

It begins with a “Short Course in Blender Cooking” that includes the advice

“You own an electric blender….USE IT EVERY DAY!’

They’re also terribly fond of all caps, never realizing that ONE DAY it will look like they’re SHOUTING.

The second section is 30 ways to use your blender every day, the first way being

1. Whip Cream.

I would like to pause for a moment and contemplate the place where whipped cream is an everyday thing……..

or even this kind of whipped cream

Back to blenders…..

This is the 8 button model, but I’m pretty sure ours wasn’t white. On the other hand, it wasn’t the first blender and it certainly wasn’t the last…

Blenders have come and gone, but this little cookbook has remained. I had to promise that my time with it is a LOAN agreement, and that it must return to the ancestral home and take it’s rightful place next to Betty Crocker, the 1957 Better Homes and Gardens and the Church cookbook (which I’ll be borrowing next).

But a quick and easy cheese sauce for mac and cheese…which takes slightly longer then 40 seconds to make, especially if you need 2 batches to feed everyone around the table.

It also calls for only one sort of cheese – cheddar – and cheddar is great – we often had Cracker Barrel cheddar in the house

Cracker Barrel cheese has a Facebook page…I can’t make this stuff up

but we usually we used several different sorts of cheeses in the sauce, one of them being Velveeta.

Rich Cheese Sauce – makes 3 cups

2 tablespoons soft butter or margarine

2 tablespoons flour

½ teaspoon salt (I add the salt after the cheese is blended in because the salt level of cheese varies so much)

1/8 teaspoon pepper

2 cups scalding milk

1 ½ cups diced Cheddar cheese (Don’t be afraid to mix this up – great way to use up bits)

Fascinating. I may try it; it sounds a lot like the 15-minute cheese sauce only faster! And I do have my mother’s 1945 Waring. One does have to scald the milk, however, so it’s really not JUST 40 seconds. (I like caps, too.)